Mood affects social cognition and “theory of mind”, such that people in a persistent negative mood (i.e., dysphoria) have enhanced abilities at making subtle judgements about others’ mental states. Theorists have argued that this hypersensitivity to subtle social cues may have adaptive significance in terms of solving interpersonal problems and/or minimising social risk. We tested whether increasing the social salience of a theory of mind task would preferentially increase dyspshoric individuals’ performance on the task. Forty-four dysphoric and 51 non-dysphoric undergraduate (...) women participated in a theory of mind decoding task following one of three motivational manipulations: (i) social motivation (ii) monetary motivation, or (iii) no motivation. Social motivation was associated with the greatest accuracy of mental state decoding for the dysphoric group, whereas the non-dysphoric group showed the highest accuracy in the monetary motivation condition. These results suggest that dysphoric individuals may be especially, and preferentially, motivated to understand the mental states of others. (shrink)

Christians have traditionally conceived of the moral life as an imitation of Christ, whereby followers enter into fellowship with God. The American Transcendentalists can be understood as extending rather than dispensing with this legacy. For Emerson, a person cultivates virtues by imitating those she loves and admires. Ultimately, however, the virtues enable her to innovate on received models, to excel by pressing beyond exemplars. Emerson's famous line, “imitation is suicide,” is not a contradiction but a fulfillment of the imitation of (...) Christ, understood in his terms. In his own time, John Brown was the public figure who, for Emerson, most nearly exemplified this innovative imitation of Christ. An examination of exemplarity, of this artful union of imitation and innovation in moral and spiritual formation, sheds light on how modern agents can cultivate the virtues needed to be at home in the modern world. (shrink)

American transcendentalists were eager to oppose structural evils such as slavery and poverty. The 1840s were characterized by experiments and debates about whether and how such evils could be opposed. Orestes Brownson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, following Thomas Carlyle and William Ellery Channing, set the terms of this debate. In the end, despite their different anthropologies, ecclesiologies, and prescriptions for opposing evil, they agree that spiritual reform is integral to sociopolitical reform. This transcendentalist debate illuminates the role (...) of personal responsibility and reform in efforts to oppose structural evil in our own time. (shrink)

In this article, I offer an analysis of what it is to take offense and what doing so is like, on which a more nuanced and positive appraisal of this emotion becomes possible as compared to its popular reputation. First, I survey the shortfalls of the limited discussion of offense by philosophers, before proposing an alternative analysis. Second, I distinguish offense from nearby emotions, like anger, disgust, and pride. Third, I examine the implications not only for how we conceptualize offense (...) but also how we regard those who take it. On my account, offense tends to be a smaller-scale, more everyday emotion than those making claims about its threats to society suppose, and one ripe for a moral reassessment. While offense sometimes appears excessive, that is likely only in limited cases: namely, those requiring symbolic withdrawal or proxy forms of estrangement. Even there, the appearance of excess may be illusory, with the grander gestures of offense appropriate given the distance between the offended and offending parties. Furthermore, on my account, to take offense is to resist affronts to one's standing, rather than merely a reflection of hurt feelings. Concluding, I sketch a defense of this resistance as a sometimes valuable response to injustice. (shrink)

Previous research reported that college students' symbolic addition and subtraction fluency improved after training with non-symbolic, approximate addition and subtraction. These findings were widely interpreted as strong support for the hypothesis that the Approximate Number System (ANS) plays a causal role in symbolic mathematics, and that this relation holds into adulthood. Here we report four experiments that fail to find evidence for this causal relation. Experiment 1 examined whether the approximate arithmetic training effect exists within a shorter training period than (...) originally reported (2 vs 6 days of training). Experiment 2 attempted to replicate and compare the approximate arithmetic training effect to a control training condition matched in working memory load. Experiments 3 and 4 replicated the original approximate arithmetic training experiments with a larger sample size. Across all four experiments (N = 318) approximate arithmetic training was no more effective at improving the arithmetic fluency of adults than training with control tasks. Results call into question any causal relationship between approximate, non-symbolic arithmetic and precise symbolic arithmetic. (shrink)

With the normative demand to attend to social difference and an absence of universal evaluative terms with which to do so, recent theory has increasingly turned to the study of the affective rather than epistemological conditions of ethical encounter. This I call a “dispositional ethics” that construes responsibility as responsiveness. Recent articulations of such an ethics, notably in the most current work of Judith Butler, James Tully, Jade Larissa Schiff, and Ella Myers, highlight its connection to situated practices of concrete (...) bodies-in-relation, but often stop short of developing an account of what such embodied practices might be. Based on interviews with thirteen experts who take the body as their primary vocational and intellectual field and characterize their practice as an art of listening, I distinguish three dimensions of a dispositional ethics in practice and some of the specific strategies available to cultivate the conditions for responsiveness in political life. (shrink)

Exploring key topics in contemporary aesthetics, this work analyzes the issues that arise from the unique works of Frank Sibley (1923-1996), who developed a distinctive aesthetic theory through a number of papers published between 1955 and 1995. Here, thirteen philosophical aestheticians bring Sibley's insight into a contemporary framework, exploring the ways his ideas foster important new discussion about issues in aesthetics. This collection will interest anyone interested in philosophy, art theory, and art criticism.

Where ethical or regulatory questions arise about an individual’s interests in accessing bioinformation about herself, the value of this information has traditionally been construed in terms of its clinical utility. It is increasingly argued, however, that the “personal utility” of findings should also be taken into account. This article characterizes one particular aspect of personal utility: that derived from the role of personal bioinformation in identity construction. The suggestion that some kinds of information are relevant to identity is not in (...) itself new. However, the account outlined here seeks to advance the debate by proposing a conception of the relationship between bioinformation and identity that does not depend on essentialist assumptions and applies beyond the narrow genetic contexts in which identity is customarily invoked. The proposal is that the identity-value of personal bioinformation may be understood in terms of its instrumental role in the construction of our narrative identities, specifically that its value lies in helping us to develop self-narratives that support us in navigating our embodied existences. I argue that this narrative conception provides useful insights that are pertinent to the ethical governance of personal bioinformation. It illuminates a wider range of ethical considerations in relation to information access; it accounts for variations in the utility of different kinds of information; and it highlights that the context in which information is conveyed can be as important as whether it is disclosed at all. These arguments are illustrated using an example drawn from psychiatric neuroimaging research. (shrink)

Some individuals facing dementia contemplate hastening their own death: weighing the possibility of living longer with dementia against the alternative of dying sooner but avoiding the later stages of cognitive and functional impairment. This weighing resonates with an ethical and legal consensus in the United States that individuals can voluntarily choose to forgo life‐sustaining interventions and also that medical professionals can support these choices even when they will result in an earlier death. For these reasons, whether and how a terminally (...) ill individual can choose to control the timing of their death is a topic that cannot be avoided when considering the dementia trajectory. With a focus on the U.S. context, this landscape review considers the status of provisions that would legally permit people facing dementia to hasten death with appropriate support from medical professionals. This review can be used to plan and guide clinical and legal practitioner discussion and policy development concerning evolving questions not fully covered by existing medical decision‐making provisions. (shrink)

Accessible and comprehensive guide to the philosophy of sport, providing students with an overview of the main issues, ideas and literature. The book offers a wide-ranging and engaging exploration of key concepts, topics and questions. Students are given the opportunity to consider significant debates in the philosophy of sport and each chapter contains short insightful interviews with eminent scholars in order to give a broader understanding of the history and development of the subject. The main themes covered within this text (...) include: the nature of sport and its relation to play and games; sport and the body; aesthetics and the aesthetic value of sport; a consideration of fair play, rules and the ethos of sport; the nature of competition; the application and effect of technology on sport; and introductions to contemporary ethical issues such as doping, violence, disability, nationalism, elitism and sexual equality, as well as a broader reflection on the connection between sport and moral development. Pedagogical features include: suggestions for further reading and additional resources, a glossary of philosophical terms, and helpful summaries of the focal material. (shrink)

Given a rich environment, how do we decide on what information to use? A view of a single entity (e.g., a group of birds) affords many distinct interpretations, including their number, average size, and spatial extent. An enduring challenge for cognition, therefore, is to focus resources on the most relevant evidence for any particular decision. In the present study, subjects completed three tasks—number discrimination, surface area discrimination, and convex hull discrimination—with the same stimulus set, where these three features were orthogonalized. (...) Therefore, only the relevant feature provided consistent evidence for decisions in each task. This allowed us to determine how well humans discriminate each feature dimension and what evidence they relied on to do so. We introduce a novel computational approach that fits both feature precision and feature use. We found that the most relevant feature for each decision is extracted and relied on, with minor contributions from competing features. These results suggest that multiple feature dimensions are separately represented for each attended ensemble of many items and that cognition is efficient at selecting the appropriate evidence for a decision. (shrink)

This essay interprets changes in how “the political” was employed by a group of political theorists connected to the University of California, Berkeley, from the late 1950s up to the present. Initially, the political names both what students of politics ought to study and invokes a way of studying meant to have broad appeal. In later uses, however, the political takes on an evanescent quality compared to the solid realm of generality represented in earlier work. Also, only from the 1970s (...) on is the political explicitly identified with democracy. Finally, later uses of the political no longer invoke a mode of study with broad appeal but one that even most self-described political theorists fail to practice. Though the changes the author analyzes in how the political was conceived are specific to the work of a small group of theorists, they suggest a more general story about the late twentieth-century development of political theory in the American academy. (shrink)

Programmes serving international patients are increasingly common throughout the USA. These programmes aim to expand access to resources and clinical expertise not readily available in the requesting patients’ home country. However, they exist within the US healthcare system where domestic healthcare needs are unmet for many children. Focusing our analysis on US children’s hospitals that have a societal mandate to provide medical care to a defined geographic population while simultaneously offering highly specialised healthcare services for the general population, we assume (...) that, given their mandate, priority will be given to patients within their catchment area over other patients. We argue that beyond prioritising patients within their region and addressing inequities within US healthcare, US institutions should also provide care to children from countries where access to vital medical services is unavailable or deficient. In the paper, we raise and attempt to answer the following: (1) Do paediatric healthcare institutions have a duty to care for all children in need irrespective of their place of residence, including international patients? (2) If there is such a duty, how should this general duty be balanced against the special duty to serve children within a defined geographical area to which an institution is committed, when resources are strained? (3) Finally, how are institutional obligations manifest in paradigm cases involving international patients? We start with cases, evaluating clinical and contextual features as they inform the strength of ethical claim and priority for access. We then proceed to develop a general prioritisation framework based on them. (shrink)

Halley and colleagues highlight important aspects of advocacy and justice in rare disease and provide recommendations for stakeholders to encourage progress toward equity and justice. In the rare d...

For two thousand years the Mencius was revered as one of the foundational texts of the Confucian canon, which formed the basis of traditional Chinese education. Today it commands considerable attention in current debates on "Asian values" raging in classrooms and boardrooms in both East Asia and the West. This volume, which represents the work of fifteen respected scholars of early Chinese thought and culture, is an especially timely effort to bring the Mencius under fresh scrutiny. Making use of recently (...) excavated manuscripts, the contributors approach the Mencius from novel perspectives, challenge established interpretations, and confront anew issues that continue to attract and divide students of this classic text. The famous Mencian doctrine of the "goodness" of human nature forms one main focus. Questions of context and interpretation bring into sharp relief key hermeneutical issues that surround the text. Does the Mencius present a coherent and systematically developed ethical teaching? Or should it be read as a composite work, comprising different layers of material that reflect different emphases and conflicting doctrines? Traversing contested territories and exploring new avenues of understanding, the essays presented here do not aim at settling debates; on the contrary, they afford ample opportunities for further discussion on the background, interpretation, and continued relevance of this classic of Confucian philosophy. Contributors: Roger T. Ames, Irene Bloom, A. Taeko Brooks, E. Bruce Brooks, Alan K. L. Chan, Kim-Chong Chong, Antonio S. Cua, Robert Eno, Jiuan Heng, Donald J. Munro, Ning Chen, David Nivison, Kwong-Loi Shun, Sor-Hoon Tan. (shrink)

This short comment on the Court of Protection decision in W v M draws attention to the primacy the judge gave to the preservation of life and discusses the relative lack of weight accorded to M's previously expressed views.

We argue that libertarianism (roughly, the thesis that we have indeterministic, libertarian free will) is compatible with God’s infallible foreknowledge. We use eternalism (roughly, the thesis that reality is a 4-dimensional block and that past, present, and future objects exist) as an explanatory stepping stone between libertarianism and God’s foreknowledge: eternalism entails that (and comes close to explaining how) an omniscient God would know what we decide in the future even if we have libertarian free will. This account also explains (...) what is wrong with standard fatalist arguments for the incompatibility of free will and God’s foreknowledge. (shrink)

Books M and N of Aristotle's Metaphysics receive relatively little careful attention. Even scholars who give detailed analyses of the arguments in M-N dismiss many of them as hopelessly flawed and biased, and find Aristotle's critique to be riddled with mistakes and question-begging. This assessment of the quality of Aristotle's critique of his predecessors (and of the Platonists in particular), is widespread. The series of arguments in M 2 (1077a14-b11) that targets separate mathematical objects is the subject of particularly strong (...) criticism by Annas and Ross. Two related arguments in this series (1077a14-20 and 1077a24-31) will serve as cases in point. The principal charges made against these arguments (that Aristotle misunderstands or misrepresents his opponents' views, and that he engages in question-begging because he presupposes his own metaphysical views) are frequently made against Aristotle's critique of Platonist positions more generally. If, as I argue, these charges are false for our two test case arguments, then there is good reason to think that they might also be false when they are leveled against the other arguments in this M 2 series. And, although presenting an argument for this is beyond the scope of this paper, this suggests that these two charges are more often than not false when applied to Aristotle's critique of Platonist mathematical views in M-N and beyond. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the recent discovery of alleged arsenic bacteria in Mono Lake, California, and the ensuing debate in the scientific community about the validity and significance of these results. By situating this case in the broader context of projects that search for anomalous life forms, I examine the methodology and upshots of challenging biochemical constraints on living things. I distinguish between a narrower and a broader sense in which we might challenge or change our knowledge of life (...) as the result of such a project, and discuss two different kinds of projects that differ in their potential to overhaul our knowledge of life. I argue that the arsenic bacteria case, while potentially illuminating, is the kind of constraint-challenging project that could not—in spite of what was said when it was presented to the public—change our knowledge of life in the deeper sense. (shrink)

Drawing on evolutionary realism as a guiding framework and using relevant theoretical bases at macro-, meso-, and micro- levels, we investigate the relative variance explained by each level on selection and retention of Benefit Corporations. Based on a sample of 5052 observations of certified B-Corps and 1403 observations of decertified B-Corps, relative to the country and industry differences, firm-level differences explain most of the variance in non-economic performance, especially for workers and community impact areas. Industry-level differences explain small differences in (...) customers and environmental performance while country differences do not explain meaningful performance differences. The results also show a similar pattern in relative effects for decertified B-Corps. Our findings point to the value of disaggregating the relative effects of multilevel factors in further understanding drivers of non-economic performance and the decertification of B-Corps. (shrink)

I offer a fresh interpretation of the dialectical strategy of Physics 2.8’s arguments that things in nature happen for the sake of something. Whereas many recent interpreters have concluded that these arguments inevitably beg the question against Aristotle’s opponents, I argue that they constitute a careful attempt to build common ground with an opponent who rejects Aristotle’s basic worldview. This common ground, first articulated in the famous Winter Rain Argument, takes the form of an intriguing pattern of reasoning: that natural (...) proceedings that happen in a given manner always or for the most part do not do so by chance. (shrink)

Just as the nation is imagined and produced through everyday rhetoric and maps and flags, it is also constructed on the skin, and through bodies, by different types of corporeal `flagging'. In this article, I use two examples of contemporary surgical procedures to explore these dynamics. Aesthetic surgeries on `white' subjects are not often interrogated for their racializing effects, but I use the concept of `flagging' to explore how these surgeries work in the UK to align `white' bodies with a (...) white nation. US media coverage of Iraq invasion veterans with prosthetic limbs circulates narratives of heroism and patriotism, and I explore how the apparent `visibility' of these limbs works to re-embed notions of the US as a transcendent Christian nation. In these two examples of corporeal modification, the nation is `flagged' on the skin, reiterating relationships of belonging that echo practical and conceptual links with property. Propertied belonging — possessive and constitutive — unfolds through bodies, producing whiteness not only as property itself, but also as unmarked, habitual terrain. (shrink)

Does a τέχνη, qua τέχνη, need to be good-directed? On the basis of the Gorgias, many scholars have thought the answer is yes; I argue here to the contrary. There are, of course, many beneficial τέχναι, such as medicine and weaving; and there are even unconditionally good τέχναι, like the πολιτικὴ τέχνη; but Plato also happily construes piracy as a τέχνη in the Sophist, and, more normally, all sorts of neutral practices as τέχναι. In order to make this argument, I (...) provide a taxonomy of the different kinds of τέχναι and demonstrate that, across the corpus, there does not seem to be a good-directedness requirement. I then address the evidence of the Gorgias, where most commentators find a connection between τέχνη and good-directedness. I argue that this interpretation is incorrect, and that rhetoric in fact fails to be a τέχνη in the Gorgias solely because it is unable to give a rational account. A close reading of the Gorgias shows that this is a plausible interpretation, and comparison with the Phaedrus reinforces the point: in both dialogues, whether rhetoric will be a τέχνη or not hinges only on the question of rationality, not a good-directedness condition. (shrink)

Though it has gone unnoticed so far in Beauvoir Studies, the term “singularity” is a technical one for Simone de Beauvoir. In the first half of the essay I discuss two reasons why this term has been obscured. First, as is well known Beauvoir has not been read in the context of the history of philosophy until recently. Second, in The Ethics of Ambiguity at least, singularité is translated both inconsistently and quite misleadingly. In the second half of the essay (...) I attempt to demonstrate the importance of this term in The Ethics. The will to disclose being is the will to disclose the singularity of the other, whether human, land, sky or painting. Ambiguity, which Beauvoir distinguishes from absurdity in Camus, is an image suggesting this necessarily mutual disclosure of singularity. (shrink)

Studies on testing effect have showed that a practice test on study materials leads to better performance in a final test than restudying the materials for the same amount of time. Two experiments were conducted to test how distraction, as triggered by divided attention or experimentally induced anxious mood in the practice phase, could modulate the benefit of testing (vs. restudying) on the learning of interesting and boring general knowledge facts. Two individual difference factors (trait test anxiety and working memory (...) (WM) capacity) were measured. Under divided attention, participants restudied or recalled the missing information in visually presented general knowledge facts, while judging whether auditorily presented items were from a pre-specified category. To experimentally induce anxious mood, we instructed participants to view and interpret negative pictures with anxious music background before and during the practice phase. Immediate and two-day delayed tests were given. Regardless of item type (interesting or boring) or retention interval, the testing effect was not significantly affected by divided (vs. full) attention or anxious (vs. neutral) mood. These results remained unchanged after taking into account the influences of participants’ trait test anxiety and WM capacity. However, when analyses were restricted to the study materials that had been learnt in the divided attention condition while participants accurately responded to the concurrent distracting task, the testing effect was stronger in the divided attention condition than in the full attention condition. Contrary to previous studies (e.g., Tse and Pu, 2012 ), there was no WM capacity × trait test anxiety interaction in the overall testing effect. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

The fourth of five commentaries on “Bloomberg's Health Legacy: Urban Innovator or Meddling Nanny?” from the September‐October 2013.

Tree-chopping in the Aeneid has long been seen as a disturbingly violent symbol of the Trojans' colonization of Italy. The paper proposes a new reading of the poem which sees Aeneas as progressive extirpator not just of foreign rivals but also of his own Trojan relatives. Although the Romans had no family “trees” as such, their genealogical stemmata (“garlands”) had “branches” (rami) and “stock” (stirps), and their vocabulary of family relationships takes many of its metaphors from planting, adoption, and uprooting, (...) while plant life is often described in human metaphors. Imperial historians use the growth and collapse of trees to mark the rise and fall of dynasties; natural historians like Columella and Pliny use metaphors of adoption, abortion, and adultery to characterize the perversions of agriculture and horticulture. It is thus no coincidence that Aeneas' encounters with Hector, Priam, Deiphobus, and others often take place against a background of real or metaphorical trees (tree similes, headless or mutilated human trunks, ancient trees and woods). These encourage us to see an element of dynastic encroachment in scenes that look pious and peaceable but confirm Aeneas' ascendancy and claim to Trojan succession. The Polydorus episode in particular can be read not just as a grotesque interlude but as a nightmare about endlessly reproducing heirs; one loose strand from Priam's house is allowed to remain, while Virgil deals imperfectly with the problem of Aeneas' own successors. The paper ends by re-examining Virgil's account of grafting in Georgics 2 and arguing that it is viewed positively, perhaps in order to cast Augustus' adoption of heirs as a miracle solution. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Broken Bodies and Healing Communities: The Challenge of HIV and AIDS in the South African ContextEmily Reimer-BarryBroken Bodies and Healing Communities: The Challenge of HIV and AIDS in the South African Context Edited by Neville Richardson Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: Cluster Publications, 2009. 209 pp. $12.00.The township of Mpophomeni, like many communities in South Africa, has been tragically devastated by HIV/AIDS. Christian churches in the region have responded to (...) this ongoing crisis in a variety of ways. In this collection of essays, edited by Neville Richardson, a team of international scholars from various subfields has combined ethnography and qualitative research with theology, with the goal of understanding how Christian churches have responded to the needs of the people of Mpophomeni. This book is the result of a two-year collaborative research project. The title of the book alerts the reader to two major themes of the unfolding narrative: the reality of brokenness, suffering, and sin (individual, interpersonal, social, and ecclesial) and the goal of healing (again, individual, interpersonal, social, and ecclesial). The ten chapters, individually authored, are divided thematically into three sections: Part 1, “Healing and Community: Perspectives from Zulu Culture and Religion”; Part 2, “Caring, Healing and Faith Communities”; and Part 3, “Caring and Community: Training in a Hospital Setting.” As perhaps expected, the authors’ conclusions remain ambivalent. James R. Cochrane explains: “Religion per se is not innocent of breaking bodies, which should always stand as a warning to us. But religion per se is also the source of healing; indeed, in some ways it is all about healing or wholeness, in relation to the sacred” (115). Churches in Mpophomeni have been “protective spaces” (11), “bridging communities” (91), and “broken bodies” that remember and re-member “the broken body of Jesus” (145–51). But communities are also in flux (101) and are sources of discourse that stigmatizes and shames (172).The book presents clearly argued and compelling essays that work independently and could be read or adopted for class as individual essays. The authors approach some of the same difficult questions from different vantage points, methodological foundations, and subdisciplines. For example, in the first two chapters Sidsel Roalkvam and Jone Salomonsen describe the many social problems in Mpophomeni, including poverty, unemployment, gender inequalities, sexual violence, drug and alcohol addiction, and criminal violence. But their [End Page 225] ethnographic research uncovers some of the rituals of healing that help the community to cope, including the practice of communal “strong prayer” (11–15), and uMemulo rite of passage for girls (23–37).However, I wish there were more coherent conversation between the authors of each individual essay. While Richardson explains that the research was collaborative “not only in terms of interaction between the researchers and the community but also among the researchers themselves” (ix), this collaboration between the researchers is not obvious to the reader in the final format of the book. Perhaps another book format would have more fruitfully conveyed this collaborative stance (for example, the inclusion of responses to each chapter or the addition of a roundtable discussion chapter or coauthored chapters).The ethnographic data presented in the third section is particularly rich and challenging for theology, but the authors could have spent more time unpacking, contextualizing, and analyzing the included quotations from patient–chaplain conversations. If, for example, the story of a thirty-three-year-old HIV+ man who allegedly raped a fifteen-year-old girl to give her “a good lesson for her life” so that she will not dress provocatively is “very characteristic of the material” in the study (203–5), much more needs to be said to explain how pastoral care interventions can address the stated “gender inequalities and the drastically different roles of men and women resulting in the vulnerable position of women” (206).The book is a must-read for scholars working on HIV/AIDS and Christian ethics. It could also provide supplemental readings for an undergraduate or graduate course in this area. [End Page 226]Emily Reimer-BarryUniversity of San DiegoCopyright © 2012 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In the woods of Spring City, Pennsylvania, lies Pennhurst, a school for people with developmental and physical disabilities from 1908 to 1987. Like many institutions, Pennhurst eventually became a place of abuse and neglect. Pennhurst was finally shut down, and the residents were relocated into group homes. Two years ago, a group well educated about Pennhurst's past formed the Pennhurst Memorial and Preservation Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to making Pennhurst into a national museum. Standing in the way of PM&PA's vision (...) was a businessman named Richard Chakejian, who purchased Pennhurst from the state for $2 million and has now converted it to a haunted house. The result is a bizarre hybrid of history and legend, and of criminality and commercialism, that simultaneously evokes and erases Pennhurst's troubled past. (shrink)

Incomplete Archaeologies takes a familiar archaeological concept--assemblages--and reconsiders such groupings, collections and sets of things from the perspective of the work required to assemble them. The discussions presented here engage with the practices of collection, construction, performance and creation in the past (and present) which constitute the things and groups of things studied by archaeologists--and examine as well how these things and thing-groups are dismantled, rearranged, and even destroyed, only to be rebuilt and recreated. The ultimate aim is to reassert (...) an awareness of the incompleteness of assemblage, and thus the importance of practices of assembling (whether they seem at first creative or destructive) for understanding social life in the past as well as the present. The individual chapters represent critical engagements with this aim by archaeologists presenting a broad scope of case studies from Eurasia and the Mediterranean. Case studies include discussions of mortuary practice from numerous angles, the sociopolitics of metallurgy, human-animal relationships, landscape and memory, the assembly of political subjectivity and the curation of sovereignty. These studies emphasise the incomplete and ongoing nature of social action in the past, and stress the critical significance of a deeper understanding of formation processes as well as contextual archaeologies to practices of archaeology, museology, art history, and other related disciplines. Contributors challenge archaeologists and others to think past the objects in the assemblage to the practices of assembling, enabling us to consider not only plural modes of interacting with and perceiving things, spaces, human bodies and temporalities in the past, but also to perhaps discover alternate modes of framing these interactions and relationships in our analyses. Ultimately then, Incomplete Archaeologies takes aim at the perceived totality not only of assemblages of artefacts on shelves and desks, but also that of some of archaeology's seeming-seamless epistemological objects"--From publisher's website. (shrink)

By adopting Habermas’ communicative theory, this paper categorizes players’ actions into four elements. The strategic action involves players manipulating each other within the framework of a gameFootnote1; normative action is manifested in following the rules and the underlying ethos; dramaturgical action emerges through the players’ deliberate presentation of themselves to both participants and spectators; and communicative action reveals the purpose of a game as a way of being. The conceptualization of game actions leads to a qualitative redefinition of the perfect (...) game, which enables a greater understanding of the game, its participants, and human excellence. As such, this paper’s significance lies in the proposal that the Habermasian perfect game is a potential solution to Suits’ puzzle about what type of games can be played in his Utopia. (shrink)